Filipino cooking tips and techniques.

Saturday, September 19, 2015

This weekend is the Singapore Grand Prix and when I started thinking about what I could make for Formula 1 Foods, the blog challenge I've been running this year, my mind went straight to one thing: Singapore Slings. I discovered the cocktail when I was on holiday in Singapore and had one at the Raffles hotel where the drink was invented; you can read my review here.

Here's the recipe for the cocktail itself, on the back of a notebook I bought in the hotel. Until now when I've made it at home I've left out the Dom Benedictine as it's expensive and you only use a tiny amount (and I don't know any other cocktails it's used in) but this time decided to push the boat out and buy a bottle.

I decided to recreate the flavours of the cocktail in a cake and that the form of a bundt would work best.

I turned to bundt queen Rachel McGrath's website Dolly Bakes and used her 'build a bundt' recipe for the basic mixture to which I could add my own flavours. Click on the link to see her recipe and have a look around her fab site. I did leave out the yogurt from Rachel's recipe as I was going to add something else for the moisture but otherwise I followed her recipe.

I decided to put pineapple in the cake as this is the predominant flavour of the cocktail (as it's the main mixer as you can see from the quantities above). I used fresh pineapple that I had previously chopped and frozen; I reckon it's the equivalent of one small 227g tin once drained or around 200g of fresh pineapple. Make sure it's finely chopped and add to the bundt mixture.

I mixed up a cocktail with all the ingredients apart from the bitters which I didn't have and the pineapple juice, so this was basically neat alcohol. I poured it all into the cake mixture and stirred it in. (This replaces the yogurt in Rachel's recipe).

I greased my bundt tin with Cake Release and baked the bundt for about an hour, by which point it seemed to be cooked when I tested it with a skewer. I left it to cool in the tin and when I went to turn it out... disaster! The top (or bottom, when it's in the tin) of the cake stuck to the tin and a fair bit of it broke off on the way out. I was left with a pretty unappealing top to the cake.

It should have been this shape...

.. and instead it looked like this.

I had already decided I would cover it with a Singapore Sling glaze so once again mixed up the neat cocktail and added a generous dash of pineapple juice for the flavour, but didn't water it down too much. I mixed a spoonful of the cocktail with some icing sugar, adding a little more liquid until I got the right consistency - an icing that I could pour over the cake that would run down the sides but that wasn't too thin.

You can still see how misshapen the top of the cake is, which was a shame, but when I served this at a barbecue to celebrate my engagement in August, I started to apologise for the way the cake looked but was told that it was the taste that mattered and that it tasted great! I had no idea what to expect, having invented this recipe and never tried it before, but it seemed very successful. The cake itself was light and moist and the flavours of the cocktail really came through in the icing with the cake itself tasting predominantly of pineapple but with a little extra something. Now if I make it again I just need to figure out how to get it out of the tin in one piece!